Is there fic out there in the Leverage fandom where Sterling has to work with the FBI and he’s going not-so-quietly insane because everyone in the FBI is utterly convinced that Parker & Hardison are actual bone fide agents? Like, they pity Sterling because they’re just so damn good that they’ve managed to sell him on their covers as con artists? They’re such good agents that they’ve managed to fool Interpol?
My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.
She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.
And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.
I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.
But he slept in his workshop.
Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.
She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.
My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.
So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.
They missed each other desperately from across the yard.
I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.
And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.
The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.
There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.
But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.
Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.
Thank you for sharing this. I had never considered that aspect of the birth control revolution.
My great-grandmother also had twelve children and I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently as I debate having a second. Because I have a choice. We have options. She didn’t.
This was a really beautiful story. Thank you so much for sharing it with the world.
left one is a boy trapped inside the body of a girl, yet everyone around him keeps impossing him all the girls’ stardarts (that’s why they’re coloring him pink); right one is a girl trapped inside the body of a guy and the same applies for all the hands touching her
thank you so much for explaining
So….I saw some tags on this that were like “but some trans women may be cool with masculine stuff, and some trans men may be cool with feminine stuff so maybe this is less applicable to those people”
Let me explain something to you: this visual, the one right there, it has nothing to do with masculine and feminine. I am an incredibly feminine trans man. What this is depicting, though, is the experience of trans people people being invasively dehumanized and made to appear in the form of another gender. That I am a man who enjoys many very traditionally feminine things does not make this less applicable to me. It makes it more applicable.
When people tell you that makeup and nail polish (two things I adore) make you a woman…. you feel like your gender has just been scrubbed away by someone else’s hands. As though they are coating your body in a lie you can never explain to them is so wrong you want to scream.
Feminine trans men and masculine trans women face all the same struggles as cis people who cross traditional masculine/feminine boundaries and then some. Because our gender has to be earned and proven, in a way cis people never have to do. People ask me why if I like makeup and nail polish I don’t just “stay a woman” and I can never really seem to make them understand that I NEVER was a woman. That I did not “become” a man. That I always was and my presentation as feminine in some ways did not make me female.
It feels like someone else, painting over our truth, hands like ravaging wolves, words like stinging cuts, judging eyes like daggers. It is invasive and terrifying and most of us experience it when we are so young we simply do not know how to respond.
So we fold ourselves into foreign shapes. Pretend that who we are fits the cis/heteronormative standards of masculine and feminine. And we are still so very much that image up above. It is still someone telling us what our gender should be, painting over our truth, laying us bare as though they own our bodies and our minds and our souls.
So please, friends. Don’t imagine that because I like nail polish and eyeliner that the above does not apply to me. If anything, it applies MORE, because people try to convince me on a regular basis that those two things should mean I am a woman, because women are feminine and they like nail polish and eyeliner. But the truth is, none of those things determine my gender.
Stop putting your hands on my body, stop painting over my truth, stop imagining for a moment that you know what it feels like to be forcibly removed from who you are. Just stop. And let us be who we are. Free from the expectation of your narrow ideas of male and female and masculine and feminine.
Please. Take your hands off me. And all my brothers and sisters.
